Chapter 16
GRACE
Grace nervously paced the floor of her small apartment. In the center of the living room, several large boxes stared at her. She knew that they contained a double crib, a changing table, high chairs, and other items that Alex had ordered from the list they’d put together.
And now Alex himself was coming here. To her tiny apartment. To help her assemble baby furniture.
They’d met several times since the doctor’s appointment last week.
He’d dropped off food that night, as he’d said he would, but Grace hadn’t invited him in.
A few days later, they’d met at his apartment to discuss baby furniture and start a shopping list. Grace had struggled not to look at the bedroom where she’d spent the best night of her life with a man who’d turned out to be far more complicated than she’d thought.
She’d left quickly, as soon as they were done with the logistics.
Now, Alex was going to be here. Here! In her small apartment with mismatched thrift-store furniture and the couch where she’d napped that afternoon when pregnancy exhaustion had overtaken her.
Just as Grace was about to force herself to take deep breaths, the doorbell rang. She hurried to open it and found Alex on her stoop with a friendly smile and a plastic bag in his hand.
“Hi, Grace,” he said.
“Hi.” Grace managed a smile. She had no idea how awkward this evening was going to be.
“How are you feeling?” Alex asked.
“I’m okay, thanks. The second trimester is treating me well. How are you?” She didn’t mention the tiredness or the nap.
“Fine.” Alex paused. “Even better if I could come in.”
“Right!” Grace stepped back to let him enter. As he did, she saw her apartment through his eyes: the little kitchen with no dishwasher and only two burners, the living room with just enough space for a small secondhand couch, the old posters Grace had bought from a thrift store and framed.
“Nice place,” he said. Grace squinted at him to see if he was joking, but he seemed serious. “I brought food.” He held up the bag. “Salad, in case you want something healthy. Chinese takeout, in case you don’t.”
“Maybe a little of both,” Grace suggested. She gestured at her small table, where they took seats across from each other as Alex handed out the food. For a few minutes, they ate in silence.
“How’s…” Grace trailed off. She didn’t know what to talk about with Alex anymore. They couldn’t chat about work. She already knew details of his childhood. There were only so many times they could say, “Wow, twins! Hard to believe it.” What else was there to discuss?
“How’s your mom?” Alex asked. Grace seized on the safe topic.
“She’s good. She’s taken up windowsill gardening. Last time I went over there, she had a bunch of herbs in old yogurt containers lined up by her kitchen window. She made me a very nice tabbouleh with some of the parsley.”
Alex smiled. “Good for her.”
“Well, for now. I’m worried it’s going to expand until she’s growing carrots and beets in the sink.” Grace made a face to show that she was joking.
“Let’s hope not!”
They both laughed, then silence descended again. Grace picked at her vegetable stir-fry and salad.
“How are your parents?” she managed. “And your sister?”
“Kathryn is great,” Alex said. “She has two young daughters already, so she’s been showering me with parenting tips. ‘If you don’t know why the baby is crying, look for a hair tourniquet!’ ‘Set a reasonable curfew in high school and stand by it.’ She makes it all sound so intimidating.”
“You told her about me?” Grace asked, surprised.
“Of course. Although I may have left out a few select details.”
“That seems wise. Given the… situation.”
Silence descended again. The only sound was each of them taking bites of their dinner and the clock on the wall ticking.
“Thank you for coming today,” Grace said after the silence became too much to bear. “I picked out a nice color for the nursery walls.”
“Was it the yellow you showed me last weekend?” Alex asked.
“Exactly. I thought it was nice and sunny.”
“It’ll look really lovely.” Alex smiled at her. “You know, I was wondering if we should have a theme.”
“A theme?”
“A nursery theme. Like ducklings or zoo animals or outer space.”
“Wow.” Grace grinned. “You’ve really put thought into this. What are you leaning toward?”
“Hmm…” Alex considered. “We could do a beach theme, maybe? I know you love the beach.”
“I do.” Grace smiled. “We could do yellow walls like the sun and sand, blue accents on the furniture for the water, a fish mobile…”
“Their names written in ocean-style letters,” Alex added.
“Yeah.” Grace nodded. “That would be nice, right?”
“Right,” Alex agreed. “See, we’ve got this parenting thing down! Regardless of what Kathryn says.”
“I like your optimism, but I can’t imagine it’ll be that easy when we have two infants crying at alternating times,” Grace said, but even as she spoke, she stroked her hand fondly over her stomach. She already loved her children, and they weren’t even here yet.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get them on a schedule,” Alex said.
“Right…” Grace frowned. “Have you spent much time with babies?”
“I’ve spent lots of time with my nieces.”
“That’s nice.”
“Have you spent much time with babies?”
“Sure. I babysat all through high school. And I’m the mom, so these things will just come naturally to me.” Grace flipped her hair and grinned broadly to show that she was joking about that last part. Alex chuckled.
“Now who’s being overly optimistic?”
“Me. It’s me. Now, should we move to the nursery to work on painting? We can finish dinner later.”
“Sure.”
They both stood, and Grace led Alex down the hall to her spare bedroom.
Formerly, it had been her home office, but she’d moved her extra desk and monitor out to make room.
Now, with drop cloths on the floor and cans of paint at the ready, it looked strangely empty.
It was small, about the size of the average walk-in closet, but big enough for the furniture they’d picked out.
The window looked out over the apartment complex’s back garden.
“Do you know how to paint?” Grace asked, hands on her hips.
“I do.” Alex expertly opened the first can of paint with the edge of a flat screwdriver and set it down. Paint fumes wafted out. “Maybe you shouldn’t be here.”
“I’ll open the window.” Grace did so, and the smell of paint was immediately replaced by the fresh scent of grass and flowers from the garden.
Grace and Alex arranged themselves, dipped rollers into paint troughs, and got to work.
It was surprisingly fun transforming the walls from the plain beige they’d been when Grace moved in (a color she’d never had the time, money, or energy to change) into the bright, sunshine-like buttery yellow.
After a while, she hooked up her Bluetooth speaker to her phone and put on a happy playlist that had her dancing around the room.
When she glanced at Alex, she saw that he was nodding his head along, too.
It was almost possible to believe that they were regular parents eagerly awaiting the birth of their babies.
“What do you think?” Alex asked as he finished up the final section of the final wall.
“It looks great.” Grace added a dab of paint to a spot they’d missed and stood back, hands on her hips again. “Our beach-themed room is coming together.”
“Should we work on the crib?” Alex asked. Grace glanced at her phone.
“It’s getting late—don’t you need to get back to work?”
Alex met her eyes. “What could be more important than this?”
A heartbeat passed, then Grace nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s start assembling. I’ll just grab some mints first.”
“Oh, I forgot.” Alex reached into his pocket and pulled out a tin. “I brought you these.”
“You didn’t have to.” Grace popped one into her mouth. “But thank you.”
“Anytime. I meant what I said about being around. About being there for you.”
“And I appreciate that.” Grace met his eyes again. Then her gaze dropped a few inches to the spot of yellow paint on his collared shirt. “Um…”
“What?”
“You’ve got a little something.” She pointed to the paint. Alex looked down and shook his head.
“Oops. Hey, you’ve got something, too.”
“Where?” As Grace twisted to look at her clothes, Alex closed the space between them and put a tiny dab of yellow paint on Grace’s nose. They both laughed, and Grace wiped it off with her hand.
“Enough of that,” she said mock sternly. “We have a crib to assemble. Or cribs?”
“I’m not sure. I think it’s two cribs joined together.”
“Well, I hope they’re baby bunk beds, or they’ll never fit in here.”
“Yeah, I’m a hundred percent sure that baby bunk beds don’t exist,” Alex said in the soothing tone of someone explaining fractions to a panicky third-grader. “We’ll find space.”
“So you say,” Grace mumbled, but she followed him into the living room.
She cleaned up the paint supplies while Alex opened the boxes and read the instructions.
Then she joined him on the floor, moving a little laboriously with her increasingly large stomach.
Alex was staring at two almost identical nails with a look of great concentration.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“I think these are different,” Alex said. “One is nail A-seventeen, and the other is nail B-twenty-two. Here, look at the diagram.”
Grace frowned at the paper he was holding up, then nodded. “That’s nail A-seventeen. See? It’s a tiny bit longer.”
“Excellent.” Alex grinned. “I’ll take your word for it. What’s next?”
They dove into crib construction together, passing each other nails and screws, holding up the boards as the other joined them together, and generally working as a team. It reminded Grace of the times they’d worked together back at MatchupNow, when everything had seemed to flow.
Only this time, instead of a flawless section of code, the crib they created was lopsided and wobbly.
“Is the bed part supposed to be slanted like that?” Grace asked suspiciously. Alex placed a spare nail in the crib bed, and it rolled right out and onto the floor.
“I really don’t think so.”
“And the legs… are they supposed to be different lengths?”
“Perhaps not.”
“And most importantly, why is this section sticking out like a spike?”
“A great question.”
“Maybe—and hear me out on this one—we did something wrong.”
“I think you might be right.” Alex lifted up the edge of the box to reveal several additional pieces of wood and another bag of screws. “Especially since we didn’t manage to put any of these parts in.”
“Oh, no.” Grace face-palmed. “It’s a good thing we aren’t construction workers.”
“I think this is closer to carpentry—but agreed.”
“This is as similar to carpentry as putting a frozen pizza in the oven is to cooking,” Grace said. “And yet we still couldn’t pull it off. Do we disassemble it and start again?”
“You know, I have a more elegant solution.” Alex pulled out his phone. “Let’s have a furniture store deliver a ready-made crib. One built by professionals.”
“I love that idea,” Grace agreed. They managed to tear apart the monstrous crib and pack it back in the box to be returned.
“At least we got the painting done,” Alex said.
“True.” Grace held up her hand, and they high-fived. “I have ice cream in the fridge, if you’d like to celebrate our dubious accomplishments.”
Alex glanced at her, then sighed. “I think I’d better head home. Thanks for having me over, though.”
“Anytime you want to come and do chores for me, you’re more than welcome,” Grace replied with a smile.
“I’ll be over again soon, then.” With a wink, Alex pushed himself to his feet and gathered his things. Grace walked him to the door, and they said their goodbyes.
With Alex gone, the apartment felt surprisingly empty. Grace got a bowl of ice cream and halfheartedly watched a sitcom from the nineties that she’d already rewatched so many times, it was as familiar as an old blanket. Her thoughts kept drifting back to Alex, though.
They’d just spent a nice evening together. And Alex was keeping his word about showing up.
But Grace still couldn’t trust it. Not really. For all she knew, Alex was only doing this until he got bored or changed his mind, like he had before. And then he’d find a way to remove her and the babies from his life all over again.
Grace couldn’t take that kind of heartbreak, not again, so she kept her heart as closed as she could.
She was almost ready to head to bed when her phone rang. The call was from Patrick Hale. Surprised, Grace answered.
“Grace,” Patrick said. “I know it’s late, so I’ll get straight to the point. You promised some documentation about your time at MatchupNow, and I need that before we can move forward with the lawsuit. When can I expect it?”
“Um…” Grace glanced at the crib in its packaging and the takeout on her table. Even though she wasn’t ready to open her heart, she felt terrible about actively suing Alex while he was helping her out. “I’m working on it, but it might take a while.”
“Remember, this is your case,” Patrick said, sounding impatient. “The sooner you get me that information, the sooner we can move forward. There’s no use wasting time.”
“You’re right,” Grace agreed politely. “It is my case. And I’ll move forward when I’m ready.”
“Be careful,” Patrick warned. “You’re in a precarious situation, Grace. Don’t get soft now.”
“Good night, Patrick.”
Grace hung up and dropped the phone into her lap. She wasn’t sure whether she’d made the right decision by putting him off—but she knew she’d done the best she could. Suing her ex-boss was one thing, but suing the father of her children was something completely different.
Anyway, she could always send Patrick what he was looking for if (or when) Alex turned his back on her again.
When Patrick tried to call her again the following day, Grace ignored his call. Instead, she wrote to Alex and asked how he’d feel about doing some online shopping for nursery decorations the following evening. He replied right away that he was in.